What is precariousness? Disentangling a phenomenon that characterizes the youth generation

Precariousness and the growth of non-standard work have emerged as crucial factors contributing to the diversification and delay of young people’s transition to adulthood. Despite their popularity, there is a lack of clarity in the operationalisation of these concepts, especially regarding their subjective and objective components and their work and non-work dimensions. Notably, there is a critical misalignment between work-related objective indicators of precarious work (e.g. having a fixed-term contract), usually applied in surveys, and subjective-oriented approaches towards precariousness (e.g. feeling insecure), often used in qualitative studies to capture people’s perceptions and experiences that tend to go beyond a strictly work-oriented definition. This paper aims to merge these two traditions and to investigate holistically precariousness, using an original database comprising 3.012 young respondents in Spain.

The findings illustrate the multidimensional nature of precariousness, with economic insecurity and work conditions as its core elements. The involuntary nature of non-standard work emerges as a key dimension of precarity